Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

with drunken men

occasionally, exchanges confidential communications with the

policeman and has the appearance of an impregnable youth,

unassailable by truncheons and unconfinable in station-houses.

People talk across the court out of window, and bare-headed scouts

come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to know what’s the matter. The

general feeling seems to be that it’s a blessing Mr. Krook warn’t

made away with first, mingled with a little natural disappointment

that he was not. In the midst of this sensation, the beadle

arrives.

 

The beadle, though generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a

ridiculous institution, is not without a certain popularity for the

moment, if it were only as a man who is going to see the body. The

policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the

barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something that

must be borne with until government shall abolish him. The

sensation is heightened as the tidings spread from mouth to mouth

that the beadle is on the ground and has gone in.

 

By and by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the

sensation, which has rather languished in the interval. He is

understood to be in want of witnesses for the inquest to-morrow who

can tell the coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the

deceased. Is immediately referred to innumerable people who can

tell nothing whatever. Is made more imbecile by being constantly

informed that Mrs. Green’s son “was a law-writer hisself and knowed

him better than anybody,” which son of Mrs. Green’s appears, on

inquiry, to be at the present time aboard a vessel bound for China,

three months out, but considered accessible by telegraph on

application to the Lords of the Admiralty. Beadle goes into various

shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants, always shutting the

door first, and by exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy

exasperating the public. Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public

loses interest and undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle in shrill

youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments of a

popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made into

soup for the workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary to

support the law and seize a vocalist, who is released upon the

flight of the rest on condition of his getting out of this then,

come, and cutting it—a condition he immediately observes. So the

sensation dies off for the time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom

a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with his shining hat,

stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all

things fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating

the palms of his white gloves one against the other and stopping now

and then at a street-corner to look casually about for anything

between a lost child and a murder.

 

Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting

about Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every juror’s name

is wrongly spelt, and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle’s own

name, which nobody can read or wants to know. The summonses served

and his witnesses forewarned, the beadle goes to Mr. Krook’s to keep

a small appointment he has made with certain paupers, who, presently

arriving, are conducted upstairs, where they leave the great eyes in

the shutter something new to stare at, in that last shape which

earthly lodgings take for No one—and for Every one.

 

And all that night the coffin stands ready by the old portmanteau;

and the lonely figure on the bed, whose path in life has lain

through five and forty years, lies there with no more track behind

him that any one can trace than a deserted infant.

 

Next day the court is all alive—is like a fair, as Mrs. Perkins,

more than reconciled to Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation

with that excellent woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor

room at the Sol’s Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice

a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional

celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes

(according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally

round him and support first-rate talent. The Sol’s Arms does a

brisk stroke of business all the morning. Even children so require

sustaining under the general excitement that a pieman who has

established himself for the occasion at the corner of the court says

his brandy-balls go off like smoke. What time the beadle, hovering

between the door of Mr. Krook’s establishment and the door of the

Sol’s Arms, shows the curiosity in his keeping to a few discreet

spirits and accepts the compliment of a glass of ale or so in

return.

 

At the appointed hour arrives the coroner, for whom the jurymen are

waiting and who is received with a salute of skittles from the good

dry skittle-ground attached to the Sol’s Arms. The coroner

frequents more public-houses than any man alive. The smell of

sawdust, beer, tobacco-smoke, and spirits is inseparable in his

vocation from death in its most awful shapes. He is conducted by

the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where he

puts his hat on the piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a

long table formed of several short tables put together and

ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots

and glasses. As many of the jury as can crowd together at the table

sit there. The rest get among the spittoons and pipes or lean

against the piano. Over the coroner’s head is a small iron garland,

the pendant handle of a bell, which rather gives the majesty of the

court the appearance of going to be hanged presently.

 

Call over and swear the jury! While the ceremony is in progress,

sensation is created by the entrance of a chubby little man in a

large shirt-collar, with a moist eye and an inflamed nose, who

modestly takes a position near the door as one of the general

public, but seems familiar with the room too. A whisper circulates

that this is Little Swills. It is considered not unlikely that he

will get up an imitation of the coroner and make it the principal

feature of the Harmonic Meeting in the evening.

 

“Well, gentlemen—” the coroner begins.

 

“Silence there, will you!” says the beadle. Not to the coroner,

though it might appear so.

 

“Well, gentlemen,” resumes the coroner. “You are impanelled here to

inquire into the death of a certain man. Evidence will be given

before you as to the circumstances attending that death, and you

will give your verdict according to the—skittles; they must be

stopped, you know, beadle!—evidence, and not according to anything

else. The first thing to be done is to view the body.”

 

“Make way there!” cries the beadle.

 

So they go out in a loose procession, something after the manner of

a straggling funeral, and make their inspection in Mr. Krook’s back

second floor, from which a few of the jurymen retire pale and

precipitately. The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen not

very neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he

has provided a special little table near the coroner in the Harmonic

Meeting Room) should see all that is to be seen. For they are the

public chroniclers of such inquiries by the line; and he is not

superior to the universal human infirmity, but hopes to read in

print what “Mooney, the active and intelligent beadle of the

district,” said and did and even aspires to see the name of Mooney

as familiarly and patronizingly mentioned as the name of the hangman

is, according to the latest examples.

 

Little Swills is waiting for the coroner and jury on their return.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, also. Mr. Tulkinghorn is received with distinction

and seated near the coroner between that high judicial officer, a

bagatelle-board, and the coal-box. The inquiry proceeds. The jury

learn how the subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about

him. “A very eminent solicitor is in attendance, gentlemen,” says

the coroner, “who, I am informed, was accidentally present when

discovery of the death was made, but he could only repeat the

evidence you have already heard from the surgeon, the landlord, the

lodger, and the lawstationer, and it is not necessary to trouble

him. Is anybody in attendance who knows anything more?”

 

Mrs. Piper pushed forward by Mrs. Perkins. Mrs. Piper sworn.

 

Anastasia Piper, gentlemen. Married woman. Now, Mrs. Piper, what

have you got to say about this?

 

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and

without punctuation, but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the

court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been

well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but

one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen

months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live

such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the

plaintive—so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased—was

reported to have sold himself. Thinks it was the plaintive’s air in

which that report originatinin. See the plaintive often and

considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go

about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins

may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her

husband and herself and family). Has seen the plaintive wexed and

worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you

cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be

Methoozellers which you was not yourself). On accounts of this and

his dark looks has often dreamed as she see him take a pick-axe from

his pocket and split Johnny’s head (which the child knows not fear

and has repeatually called after him close at his eels). Never

however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far

from it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if

not partial to children and never see him speak to neither child nor

grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing

down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was here

would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent).

 

Says the coroner, is that boy here? Says the beadle, no, sir, he is

not here. Says the coroner, go and fetch him then. In the absence

of the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr.

Tulkinghorn.

 

Oh! Here’s the boy, gentlemen!

 

Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But

stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few

preliminary paces.

 

Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody

has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is

short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE don’t

find no fault with it. Spell it? No. HE can’t spell it. No

father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home?

Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t

recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows

both. Can’t exactly say what’ll be done to him arter he’s dead if

he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it’ll be

something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right—and so he’ll

tell the truth.

 

“This won’t do, gentlemen!” says the coroner with a melancholy shake

of the head.

 

“Don’t you think you can receive his evidence, sir?” asks an

attentive juryman.

 

“Out of the question,”